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Thanks to everyone at Comstar Media and Avalon Game Company for putting up with me as I learned all of these lessons the hard way.

Introduction

You have a great idea for a new game. I haven’t even heard it yet and I already know it’s a great idea. There are untold multitudes of great ideas for games out there.

Designing your own game has become something of a rite of passage in the RPG industry. Using professional game systems you can design fascinating adventures, original characters, and even entire new worlds; but the game mechanics still lock you into the existing ‘reality’ of the game system. And, there are always a few things about even your favorite system that you think should have been handled differently. Designing your own game allows you to tailor every detail of the game to fit your vision perfectly.

But turning your vision into a playable game requires long hours of planning, hard work, and revision. The advent of desktop publishing has made creating a game easier than ever before. But ‘easy’ is still a far cry from ‘automatic.’

This tome collects lessons learned through years of, often painful, trial and error. The tips, tricks, and tools outlined in these pages will help you develop your dream into the best game possible. There is no single ‘right way’ to make a game. You need to find the way which works best for you. Although the topics are arranged roughly in order from initial conception to finally promoting the game, the creative process is far from linier. Issues which will come up late in the process have a direct bearing on earlier stages, forcing you to go back and rethink.

Better games raise the level of the entire industry, drawing in more customers and more money. And a stronger RPG industry benefits us here at Avalon Games. Thus you could say that my desire to help you and your game succeed is not entirely altruistic.

The Reality of Fantasy

The worlds we create are fantasy, but as a game designer you must deal with the reality around you. And this reality can intrude into your fantasy.

Letting others Play in your Sandbox

The hardest part of writing fiction, especially games, is that once you share your work with others, you lose control of your world. The easiest to understand example would be fan fiction, where people who enjoy your work take your characters and write their own stories. When you write, your characters become your friends and the world becomes your home. It is rewarding to see other people enjoy your work; but no matter how closely a fan copies your style, they will never do things exactly the way you do. It can be emotionally difficult to watch people mishandle you characters and your world. There are legal (although not effective) recourses against fan fiction, but with a game, you explicitly invite the readers into your world to play.

Once others are involved, it is no longer your private world, and you can never get it back. Be warned that people who play your game will do things you never intended: raze towns, kill important characters (in horribly graphic ways), rewrite character personalities, newbie adventurers will slay epic monsters. Worse, the players will append your world with bizarre locations while removing your favorite places from the map. They will ‘read between the lines’ and discover absurd ‘truths’ about your world.

If you work with a publishing company, the alterations to your world start before the product even reaches the consumers. Very few publishers will accept a work without checking to make sure it fits into their existing product line. Most publishers will offer at least a few suggested changes. In most cases these changes are valid improvements if you’re willing to let others have a hand in your creation.

Publishing and sharing your world with others can be a wonderful social experience that is impossible with private writing, but it requires letting go of your world so that others can enjoy it on their own terms. You have to decide for yourself if it is worth the tradeoff.

Setting Reasonable Goals for your Product

How many adventuring parties would wander out into the wilderness without supplies, maps, or even a goal just to see what will happen? (OK, too many parties actually do this, but what would become of them if they didn’t have a GM to get them back on track?) Yet, many aspiring game designers start out “just to see what will happen.”

Without a goal and a plan to work towards that goal, your game is unlikely to get past the stage of a collection of notes and sketches. With a clear goal in mind, you can evaluate the different options available to you and determine which ones will help advance your plan. There are many things you can try which will be fun to do, but won’t necessarily help your game succeed. There is nothing wrong with strolling down these side roads during your journey, provided you’re aware that you’ve strayed from your course and never forget your final goal.

Even if you get caught up in the side treks and your game never makes it past the planning phase, that doesn’t mean it is a failure. If your goal is to create a game that you and your friends can have fun with, then a collection of notes and sketches is all you need, and any effort you put into going pro will be moot.

At the other extreme, if your goal is to get your game printed, exactly the way you envision it with 300 full-color glossy pages, then you can’t complain if you end up with an empty bank account and 420 unsold copies in your garage because turning a profit was never part of your goal.

These are a couple of extreme examples. Most people do not set all-or-nothing goals. Instead, most plans consist of a final pie-in-the-sky dream and a series of increasingly ambitious milestones to mark progress to the impossible dream. Even if you don’t make it to that final destination at the end of the rainbow, reaching several of your milestones is an achievement in which you can take pride.

And you are allowed to change your goals along the way. The next milestone might require more time, money, and energy than you are willing to invest. There is nothing wrong with being satisfied with your accomplishment and resisting the urge to go a bridge too far. As you progress, expect to have your rosy visions of the game and fantasy market mercilessly shattered. There is every possibility that you’ll decide your original goal has too many drawbacks and you want to set off in a new direction. Changing your goals isn’t necessarily ‘giving-up’ or ‘failing;’ taking new information into account and rearranging your priorities to suit your current situation is a sign of maturity. Just don’t change your goals too often, or you’ll descend into disorganized chaos.

To help you set reasonable goals for yourself and your products, we’ll examine the current state of the fantasy and game market. In this day and age, any advice is outdated as soon as it is published, so rather than specifics we will focus on underlying truths, market forces, and trends with a full head of steam which promise to continue well into the future.

State of the Market

“How do you make a small fortune in the game industry?”

“Spend a large fortune.”

“What’s the difference between a game designer and a large pepperoni pizza?”

“The pizza can feed a family of four.”

This section is not intended to scare you away from the industry, but the fantasy and game industry can be a pretty scary place, and we won’t sugar coat the facts. There will always be nostalgia for the ‘good old days,’ but make no mistake, you have chosen the best time in history to write your game. Never has it been easier to collaborate with coauthors; find publishers and artists; proofread; and get your game to market. But publishing wouldn’t be an adventure unless there was the chance of failure. Sending you into the dungeon without first warning you of the pitfalls and monsters which await won’t do you or the industry any good.

The professional fantasy author is something of a Loch Ness Monster: often spotted, more often speculated about, but almost never confirmed. When you start to look into the ‘pros’ you find that most of them work another job in addition to their writing (Tolkien and Asimov both worked in academia in addition to their fiction writing), were paid by a company which went bankrupt for spending too much (including author salaries) on developing its products, or that even though they work at a game company, writing is only a small part of their duties.

Astute writers may point out the example of J.K. Rowling, but she writes fantasy-mysteries, and ‘mystery’ has traditionally been a larger, better selling genre than ‘fantasy.’ Thus the example is not entirely applicable. Later pages in this book cover the concept of genre more in depth, but for the time being, let it suffice to say that fantasy is not the largest genre. The number shift around a little depending on who analyzes them and how, but fantasy never comes out on top. It is usually trumped by things like: self-help, biographies, romance, mystery, and children’s books. In fact fantasy, science fiction, and horror are usually grouped into a single group which for years was dominated by the horror works of Stephen King. And this is a discussion of fiction; games are a tiny fraction of the total fantasy fiction market. Or to look at it from another perspective, consider the markets for board games like Scrabble and Life as compared to the market for role playing games. (Scrabble and Life are both property of Hasbro, names used without permission as examples of Americana culture)

There are currently game companies with paid staff. How much they are paid and how much of their time they get to spend creating are separate questions which I’m not in a position to answer. But today these game companies recruit primarily, perhaps exclusively, through their various fan clubs. Thus, if your goal is to work at a game company, your best bet is to start courting a particular company: be an active contributor to their forums; enter their contests; go to gaming conventions, meet the staff, and ask them where they scout for new talent. An entire book could be written on the tactics to land a job at a game company, and having never done so, I am not in a position to write it.

If you want to call all the shots, then you should start your own game company. The vast majority of game companies operate around the break-even point.

Today’s large game companies all started out at small ventures, so there is a non-zero chance that with the right circumstances your company could make it big. But in listening to stories from people who founded the companies which now dominate the game market, a reoccurring theme is the “years” at the beginning when the company paid its employee little or literally nothing, forcing them to find other means to support themselves. So this seems like sound advice: if you found a game company, you have to be ready to financially support both yourself and it by other means.

The other thing most people don’t realize about founding a game company is that writing is actually only a small part of the publishing industry. Even publishers which start out as ‘self-publishing’ usually end up recruiting outside authors because they are too busy running the company to write. In fact, the more successful you are, the less time you’ll have to write.

This means that game companies always have a backlog of projects they want to publish, but not enough time to write them. This drives them to hire freelance authors to work on the projects. Working as a freelance author can be fun, it can also be stressful, and it is probably the fastest route to get a game with your name on it published. Freelancing also allows you to control the amount of time you spend working on games; it’s your choice which jobs to take and which jobs to turn down.

We’ll cover the fine are of freelancing in more detail in its own section. For now, let’s look at the numbers for making a living as a freelancer. Five to ten cents a word is considered ‘pro-rate,’ so to support a minimalistic $20K a year lifestyle, at top pay rate you would need average over 700 words every day. This may not sound like much, but there is more to writing than just putting words on paper. 700 words a day means: finding an opening, writing a query letter, receiving a response to your query letter, writing the piece, editing the piece, submitting the piece, HAVING THE PIECE ACCEPTED (always the tricky part over which you have no control), revising the piece based on editorial feedback, proofing the final copy, having the company ACTUALLY PUBLISH THE PIECE AND PAY YOU (again, not a given) and helping the publisher to promote the work… for 700 words, every day without a vacation. For this discussion, we also need to say that most game publishers don’t pay pro rate.

In short, writing a game is not a step towards a larger goal: writing a game is a grand adventure which is both the journey and the goal wrapped into one. Don’t sabotage your game with unreasonable expectations; appreciate your game for what it is and enjoy the adventure.

Been hard at work the last few month putting together some great new battle tiles for you fans. Each set will offer a few passages or rooms, all set to 1″ for figure use. All of these will be a layered PDF, so you can turn off or on set features as you want. Each comes with a ton of features, so there are a bazillion different combinations for you to play with.

Here is a list of what we have so far…

Dungeon Passages, in two styles, each set to 15′, 10′ and 5′ wide passages. They come with lot of great features, such as magical wards, blood smeared fl,doors, slime, pits, water filled, and more.

Dungeon chambers, in the same two styles, with all kinds of rooms, and shapes and sizes. The also will come with all kinds of features, including pits, magical fog, crystals and more.

Crypts, both as passages and Chambers. Dark and evil, these are filled with coffins, and come with all kinds of features just like our other sets.

Specialty rooms. These feature several sets of chambers with a common use, so far we have Wizard’s Lairs (With a study, lab, library and casting rooms). Torture rooms and Prisons, Temples, Magical Gates, Chasms, Treasure Rooms, Throne Rooms, and more Tombs.

Dungeon Entrances. These small sets offer a sleet entrance to a dungeon, and include Cave with hidden entrance, temple, ruins and more.

We also have plans for select sets that feature a set racial lair or location. So far we have the Dwarf mines, and chambers worked up, but have many more planed.

If that was not enough, we are hard at work on sci-fi based tiles as well.

We have some great new stuff out this month. Here is a sample of a few of them.

We have a new series of HWM products this year, Feat book set to a class. Out first is the feat book for the Acrobat class. Inside you will find 20 feats geared towards those high flyers.

Of course no Month would be complete without for IF for our Sci-Fi fans. We have a great new IF threat book out this month, jump into your space suit and go find some adventure.

If you have not yet tried it, our Counter Wars system is a great gem of a game system. Play it anywhere, just like a table top miniature game, but without the cost, and all the little toys. This month we have the Forest Barbarians for you to beat you foe with.

Super Hero Fiction
With the rise of super heroes in pop culture, movies doing billions of dollars and the like, it is no surprise that super hero fiction has also been taking off. Its still a small nitch field of fiction, but growing every day it seems.

I have been reading a lot of this sort of fiction over the last year, almost all of it being self-published work for sale on Amazon in e-book format, but some are also in full print. The majority of it is geared toward young readers, for obvious reasons, but even so they take on some adult themes at times and are filled with action.

Here is a short list of what I have read so far and my thoughts on each series. I will not get into too much detail as I don’t want to give any plots away and create spoilers, but I will try to give an honest assessment of the stories and the writing.

Wearing the Cape by Marion C. Harmon

This series is composed of seven books so far, one of which are a sort of side story featuring one of the characters from the main series. The main character is a young female hero named Hope, while her super hero name is Astra. She gains super powers in the first book and is invited to join the super hero team of the Sentinels, which are based in Chicago. She has several adventures throughout the series, grows in power and experience and even falls in love (I sort of hate the insta-love part of the first book, but its YA so you almost have to expect it.)

There is heartbreak, danger and some fun as we watch the young heroine grow into her place in the super group.

As the series grows Astra travels about the world, does some amazing things and battles super villains, giant lizard monsters and Japanese gods.

Over all this was a great series and I have enjoyed it and look forward to reading more of it as the author produces them. Currently he is working on an RPG based on the super hero world he has created, so that’s kind of cool.

Things I did not like about this series. Well this seems to be a problem with almost all of these types of books, the problem with a climax. We are taken on a journey thought the book, building to the big boss fight at the end and then when it’s over, that’s sort of it, all done. The ending is often abrupt and too soon after the big brawl.

While other characters are present in the book, most are sort of shallow and not well developed beyond supporting Astra, all save her best super hero friend, a vampire named Artimis. (Who has a solo book of her own that deals with the supernatural elements of the work. I did not like this one as much; it just didn’t fell like the other books in the series, although it was well writing.) This does change a bit with later books in the series, as we get to know a few of the support characters, but even then they are shallow at best.

All in all I would recommend this series for anyone looking to jump into the genre, they all are well written, and easy to ready.

Just Cause by Ian Thomas Healy

This is a large series, having 13 books. The series follows a young super heroine named Mustang Sally. She is real fast, the fastest person alive it seems. Sally is a third generation super hero, her grandmother and mother both having super speed as well, but neither as fast as Sally has become.

We watch as Sally graduates from the super hero academy, and joins a super hero group called Just Cause, the premier super group in the world. There she learns the ropes of being a professional superhero, finds romance and encounters her ultimate foe, the man that killed her father and who will try to kill her several times.

The series continues with Sally gaining more experience and becoming a leader in the super hero community. She is a great character to read, the books are fun and the action is well writing and easy to follow. Unlike most of the other books, the secondary characters take up a lot of the action as well, and are developed over time.

The series takes a few right turns here and there, focusing on other places and characters in the world, where Sally takes a back seat. One focuses on some comedy. (The only one on the series I did not like, as I generally don’t like comedy fiction) One takes place in the super prison and a jailbreak, and the last one showcases some young heroes still in middle school. (I did not think I would like that one but it turned out to be fun)

Three of the books are short stories that fill in the backstory of the world, which while not needed, are a good read anyways.

Healy seems to put out two of these every year so you can keep the action going with little delay between books.

Of all the series, I like these the best.

Velveteen by Seaman McGuire

This is a large series and comedy based, so I did not get too far into the first book before I stopped. Just not my bag of tea. It is well written and has an odd ball since of fun. If you are into weird stuff then this is a good choice for you.

Good Intensions by Michael Cider

This is a single book, which focuses on a super villain that does not want to be a super villain. He sort of gets extorted into the job. I liked the book over all with the action being fun and seeing a large villain organization for the inside was cool, but the main character’s reason for becoming a super villain sort of falls short. I just did not buy it and thought it was forced and not believable. His motivation is just off. Once he does the deed though, he finds he is roped into more and more bad things which he is forced to do, and while he tires hard to avoid killing anyone, it becomes more difficult all the time.

All in all I like the book, it is well written and fun, if a little off on the character’s main reason for starting up as a super villain.

Strikeforce by Colleen Vanderlinder

Ok so not all super hero series are as good as other. This one left me cold and by the end of the third and final book I was done with it and the main character.

I did not have a problem with the writing over all, it is well done and the action was well developed. What I ended up not liking about the series is the main character is the best at everything. She is the strongest person, the fastest, and it seems the smartest as all the main problems solved are her ideas. It’s just like all the other heroes in the book are there to seem dumb so she can come up with all the good solutions to the problem. They even wait around for her to do it, when a bad villain shows up, they all hang back and wait until she shows up to capture them. It almost gets to be a comedy at times as she does everything and all the other super heroes just sort of watch.

While well written I would not recommend this series, not unless you have read all the good ones first and just need a super hero fix to get by.

Vandguard by Percival Constantine

This is a six book series that will continue I am sure. The series deals with a group of young heroes led by an unpowered soldier that wears a super exo-suit. The series watches as they grow into a super team, deal with bad super terrorists, mad scientists, aliens invasions and time travel. All in all it’s a good series, the characters are well developed over time and the action is fun.

There are a lot of super people in the book, but it seems only the heroes in the super group are the heroes in the whole world, no one else seems to be around. That and a few other miss steps drop the over all effect of the series, but over all it was a good read.

I did not find myself as invested in this series and these characters as much as I was with Just Cause or Wearing the Cape, but overall the Vandguard series is a good read.

The Indestrutbles by Mathew Phillion

A series of five books and two short stories, this is a great series about young heroes. We watch as an older hero takes in several young super people and trains them to be a force of good. Over the course of the series we get to know all of the characters well, watch as they grow in power, experience and depth.

The series takes us through battles with super organizations of terrorists, alien invasions, time travel, magical adventures and all sorts of fun thing. All of the characters are well writing and the action fun and fast as the stories seem to just cook along at the right pace.

I liked this series a lot, and am looking forward to a lot more in the future.

In conclusion, all of these series can be found on Amazon and available on Kindle. As they are cheep, you can get into a series for only a few bucks.

I am looking forward to more books in several of these series and even new series to pop up. If you like super heroes and comic books, then these are some great additional to your fandom.

We have some great new stuff coming out this year, such as Avalon hazards and Avalon Lairs.

Avalon hazards offers s short, but fun little challenge for your players, something that may or may not be dangerous, but will offer a fun opportunity for excitement.

Avalon Lairs is a short Adventure site, a lair, of some monster or bad guys. Need an adventure real fast, but don’t want to have to read a book length description, well we have the right balance of adventure and information and stats.

Always working on new gaming goodies for your great fans. This time around we are hard at work on some new battle tiles. Easy will be a layered PDF so you will have tons of options on what tom print up and how it willow.

Well another year is coming to an end and so we here at Avalon are once again taking a look back to see what we did right and what we got wrong.

2016 over all was another down year. The economy is still sluggish in terms of sales numbers and with the chaos of the election year, even more so this year then in the past, brought some doubts to the market and lower over all numbers. While the market was soft, it was not a huge drop in over all sales numbers then seen in other years, but the lower numbers were clear.

Even with lower sales numbers Avalon was a profitable venture, and expanded its product line with well over 200 new products produced and put up for sale in 2016. We were able to finally get Kung Fu Kuma out as well as all its support products. We also produced two new volumes of Heroes Weekly, with the addition of 48 new issues between the two volumes. Avalon also expanded its efforts in the Infinite Futures product line with new IF Threats and the release of Cyber Age for IF.

What Did We Do Right

Avalon tried to bring new voices to the market and added two great writers to our stable of creative people. Both woman offered great work for publishing and helped to expand our offering in Pathfinder with new issues of Heroes Weekly as well as new product line such as Avalon Spell Books and Haunts.

Avalon continued to be a profitable venture and stayed out of debt once again. We added new capital to our investments in the stock market, with double the amount of funding then we had previously invested.

One major effort this year was to clean out the pipeline of products in the works. With some effort we were able to complete, layout and either publish or have ready to publish, several products and product lines, including the long awaited HWM Powers, and Scorched Earth for Pathfinder.

Avalon was able to keep anyone willing to work with plenty to do, offering several new product lines and or opportunities to continue to have a voice in the gaming hobby. Several of our writers were able to either explore new directions to work in or were able to add to already established product lines.

As always, Avalon was on time with its payments to our creative people and only a few times did we have a hick-up with any emails being missed or late in replying. Avalon also had several new opportunities presented to us from outside sources, some of which we jumped into with both feet, while others we had to pass on because of concerns about the viability of the venture. Some opportunities we put on hold for 2017 where we will explore them in more depth.

What Did We Do Wrong

Avalon did not have any major disasters this year, but some things still need to be addressed. While the web site is a great tool for us and we continue to expand what it has to offer, with new reviews and content, we still need to push it as a destination for great gaming news and content. We failed once more to get a store front up and running, as it never really got beyond the talking stage. We also explored other ways to bring in views, with reviews and the like, but we still can do more.

Avalon once more sort of fell short of getting the word out about what we have to offer. While we have been around for almost ten years now, people are still coming in says they have never heard of us. We dropped online ads as they never seemed to pay off, but we may have to look into new efforts to bring us to the forefront of peoples minds when they think of fun games.

We talked a lot about a lots of ideas. Some while might have been fun to work on, would have cost too much and might never have brought in new money or fans. Online comics were looked at, but as with a lot of stuff, the effort to make it become a paying venture was just too much work for the return.

The same seems to be the case for online fiction. While it might be great to pursue, the effort to make it pay off might be way too much for us to bother with. Does that mean we will not eventually jump on these or other things, it is just that we may have to either wait for them to be more profit potentials or until we have the time to really promote them so that they become profitable.

What Is In The Works For the Future?

So what to look forward to in the coming year? Well Avalon has a lot in the works that’s for sure. We have David Caffee, the master writer that he is, working on a Savage Swords version of Pathfinder as well as a great setting for that game. Meanwhile we are also working on new stuff for Pathfinder, with new HWM goodies and character books, as well as new ship deck plans and threat books for IF.

With Pazio planning to release their own Sci-Fi version of Pathfinder in the summer of 2017, Avalon will be well placed with a ton of support materials to be used with that system as our IF product line will be bulging with goodies.

We are also going to jump into releases of 5e based products and are looking into having versions of IF and HWM made ready for that system as well.

We also have plans for a 5e solo system and some great new table top miniature systems. Avalon will continue to support some current product lines such Arcana and our Mini-Games as well as offer art, paper models and new Pathfinder goodies.

What will 2017 hold for Avalon, who knows . What we can says for sure is that we will continue to try to present games and gaming goodies, and to offer the best stuff we can product, and at a great price.

“So we are just going to go in and take them down, right?” Mindy asked as she and Tucker walked down the hall to her training room.

“Well, more or less,” he opened the door for the two of them, “Just because we got that tip you wrangled out of that thug doesn’t mean it’s going to be accurate.”

“But it could lead to something bigger?” Mindy persisted as she walked over to the magnetic weight-lifting equipment the company had installed for her. She could lift a car over her head these days, her capabilities expanding along with her strength-building routine.

“Yes, it could lead to something big.” Tucker said more to himself as he left her to make a call to his boss.

*****

“It was unfortunate that she fell into the information about the shipment, but once she had her nose on the trail, she just did not give it up.” Tucker explained to his boss over the phone.

“No matter,” the voice articulated without emotion. “It was not a disaster, and we were able to get most of the shipment into the city by other means.”

“And the mobsters that she caught…what about them?”

“We willget them released soon enough,” the voice affirmed just before hanging up.

We completed the last of the missions for the Mini-Mission book and Mindy came out doing just fine. She and Bounce took out the mob thugs and gained some more Exp. and goodies.